For a family with decidedly colorful art, decorator Katie Ridder went counterintuitive with luscious hues that enhance their blue-chip treasures

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Gallerists who swear that bold art is best displayed against stark white walls might blanch when confronted with a Manhattan apartment in which paintings and photographs rest against candy-color backgrounds. Actually, the works in question—a thoughtful collection ranging from an emotionally charged Kara Walker cut-paper silhouette of a church being set ablaze to a hypnotic Andrew Moore photograph of Rotari's Gallery at Peterhof—do not so much hang as they pop here and meld there. Charming or edgy, the art engages with the decor rather than keeping a reverent distance.

A Donald Baechler collage practically leaps off a pale-aqua wall in the kitchen, for example. And the lilac-painted living room is the site of a dreamlike Kiki Smith colored etching—the heroine of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sitting on a hill beneath a cloudless sky—whose complementary pastels cause it to blend into the wall behind. "It's like looking through a window," says the lady of the house, an effervescent collector who lives in the apartment's tart, funky rooms with her financier husband and three daughters.

Though the couple had long favored the neutral colors that are often deemed more art-friendly, decorator Katie Ridder helped them take a walk on the wild side, chromatically speaking. "The colors don't compete with the art, they promote it," says the wife, adding that they couldn't have done it without getting outside help. "We wanted to go somewhere we could not go on our own. Luckily, Katie was able to be that guide for us."

Fans of Ridder know that sprightly mixes of mouthwatering hues are her specialty. In the early 1990s, the shelter-magazine editor turned decorator had a sassy little shop on Lexington Avenue stocked with intriguing Turkish textiles whose smoky darks and jewely brights profoundly influenced Ridder's aesthetic. The now-defunct boutique's Ottoman pizzazz left a lasting impression on visitors too, her latest client included. As the wife explains, "I never bought anything there, but I remember everything about it." More than a decade later, she sought out Ridder to redecorate her home.

But before the designer could get down to work, the floor plan required a thorough revise to seamlessly combine the family's existing apartment and a slightly smaller one they had purchased next door. The architect tapped for the job was Ridder's favorite collaborator—her husband, the classicist Peter Pennoyer. He and partner Elizabeth Graziolo developed a refined scheme that was inspired by great apartment-house interiors of the 1920s.

"One half of it was gutted almost entirely," Ridder says of the renovation, noting that the goal was for the ninth-floor residence to "feel like a house." A long entrance hall, or gallery, serves as the main artery, separating the public rooms overlooking Central Park from the private ones on the east side of the building. ("My husband wanted some distance from four women," the homeowner wryly observes.) Skimpy period moldings—Pennoyer describes the 1925 structure as a "developer building constructed by the hundreds" back then—were replaced by fine cornices and baseboards whose lean, understated profiles have a faintly Art Deco panache.

One delightful touch is an octagonal hall that transforms an otherwise awkward spot in the floor plan into a spatial treat; more practically, it connects the gallery, kitchen, and dining room and can be used for dinner-party overflow. "We wanted to create a shape that reaches out," says Pennoyer of the space, home to a blue-horsehair-clad settee once owned by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and a punchy red-and-white abstract oil painting by Caio Fonseca.

That liveliness never lets up. Rose-pink upholstery and an aquamarine Murano-glass chandelier seem to glow in the chocolate-brown dining room, where a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, a comfortable sofa, and heirloom Louis XV–style armchairs encourage reading between meals. "We didn't want any of the rooms to be dead zones," Ridder says. Even the private elevator vestibule, a spot often given short shrift, is energized. A moody hand-painted floral pattern enriches the walls, and a sculptural cast-brass peephole that is a reproduction of a 1902 design by the Catalan Art Nouveau master Antoni Gaudí is mounted on the faux-mahogany front door.

Just as small but spirited is the study paneled with purple leather. One daughter's bathroom got a helping of bright-blue Moroccan tiles, while two others are sheathed in whimsical wallpapers Ridder found on a Finnish website. The powder room off the bold-blue pantry is surprisingly peppy as well, its paper printed with tall spindly trees that seem straight out of a children's book by Maurice Sendak.

Fine art needs white walls? "No way," says the collector, clearly a convert to color—though she avers that it took a few days for her and her husband to feel entirely at ease in their brilliant new digs. "Now we're all about embellishing!"